is an independent literary publisher based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, still often referred to as the steel city.

Blast furnaces were utilized for smelting and refining industrial metals, generally iron, and were widely used in the creation of steel in the Pittsburgh/Western Pennsylvania region during the United States' 20th century industrial boom.

Pages

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Our lives are stolen by others and We do not live them, Rule One, but weAre lived by thieves whose avarice Or generosity in some simplest Matter, once upon a time, wrote our Existence. We don’t own so much as A mood, a Tuesday, our face, any Part of our future. So history Obsesses Godard, who laments the Designs of memories as if they Belong to anyone, or could. RuleTwo: History is pubescent, Hysteric, fictive, transient, Divided into chapters which are The ghosts of spaces, empty as rooms Unremembered by whoever dreamed Within once. These are its chapters. Memorize them, or try, for the test On Friday. Nothing happened in a Billion variations at any Time. And Rule Three: Ghosts write the Upcoming but not by writing but Erasing. The long ago dead steer The car over the cliff, or onto The Channel ferry, or straight across Texas. A phantom drove you to an Addiction to the naked girl in Afternoon sun, and the genetics Of raw chance you called love.

James Robison has published many stories in The New Yorker, won a Whiting Grant and a Rosenthal Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Grand Street, and other venues. He has poetry and prose forthcoming in Story Quarterly, The Blue Fifth Review, Commonline, Rick Magazine, Scythe, Metazen, Corium Magazine, and elsewhere. James taught for eight years at the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program, was Visiting Writer at Loyola College of Maryland, and was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly.

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valedictory

first thing i know it's Weirton Steel,sulfur-stink, ore dust, and my mom,baby sister and i have driven daddown US 2 till the tin mill swallowsthe sky; i must be three, four, topsand we park next a man-bridge,and beyond it this tiny door gleams,open on the bay; though it lookslike the evil eye, dad grabshis pot, pecks mom, clambers out,and then it's me on the bridgeand it clanks under my steel toeboots, and just before that evil eye,i smile, look back, wave; inside,the bay teems, humming, brightand it sure smells like jobs in there

Among other venues, Will Watson's poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Labor, and New Laurel Review. He is a member of the English Department at University of Southern Mississippi.

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Every Day

On trash-strewn streets all across AmericaThere are drooping, black draped figuresWalking into stark-lit mini-martsJust like me; justified by an ethicOf experience and intensityThey clamor and grasp, speak in tonguesLooking for the new highsPromised behind every cellophane wrapper.

Like them, I am sick with myself and seethingTeeming with a hungry mass of devilsScraping my desiccated wastes of brainAnd finding only the generational viceThat we’ve laid, like a garland of depraved flowersOver the chains of the young – the young escapingThe interminable boredom of two-dimensionalRepresentations of reality and secondary mediated experienceOnly to find that they’ve choked themselvesWith plastic cords.

I grapple, perhaps with conscience and certainly with a sloppyInsubordinate body, for the tamest of entertainmentsIn six Tuesday-Night beer bottlesAnd watch the sloping, hooded figures snatching for hopeIn a flat, glossy mirage of spread-legged girlsAnd watch the crooning street-celebritiesReach another level with the false and commodifiedSpanish-fly that Playboy has stamped with approvalAnd watch the pock-faced Indian ladyTake their money. And when it is my turn in lineI try to explain to her that there is nothing wrong with usWith any of us, but I can’t quite find the words.

Peter Fernbach, Assistant Professor of English at Adirondack Community College and author of The Blooming Void (BlazeVOX Books), has been published widely in American journals and is concerned, lately, with the transformative and liberating effects of poetry on the unconscious mind, especially of those who are still impressionable and exploding with exuberance and possibility.

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Red Cents

Pennies in a bowlnext to the registercollect like crumbs. Castlike too many mouths

to feed. Take one.Even out, exact the dueon a fill-up,smoke pack, chew.

across the counter.Smell how they lingeron your fingers, in dampof your palm.

Deposit oneon your tongue.Taste taking.Like giving. Blood.

Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. Over the years, he has been published in Apalachee Review, The Cincinnati Review, Faultline, Heliotrope, and Oxford Magazine, among others. New poems appear or will appear in The Coe Review, The Avatar Review, Sawbuck, Forge, The Lumberyard and Edison Literary Review. A recent Pushcart nominee, Charles is currently working on a manuscript for his first collection.

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Attendant

I sell cigarettes and gasolineand hate myself for it.I’m the Clerks cancer-merchant,the ex-punk buying in.I’m the cashier who sellseveryone out, that documentaryMarjoe, the scam artistwho hates the scam.

To pass the time,I try to guess what the customerswill buy: pack of bubble gum,pack of cigarettes, quart of oil.I get a feel for these products I sell,get a feel for the people I overcharge.Over the PA, I’m the voice of god:Pump Seven, you’re approved.

I measure out my take home payin forty ounces and frozen pizzas.The counter is a barricade,a defense I’ve forgottenhow to put down,a distance I’ve forgottenhow to cross.At home I wake from dreamsto the sound of the register opening.I’m selling myself short.

Andrew Rihn is the author of several slim volumes of poetry, including the forthcoming chapbooks Foreclosure Dogs (Winged City Press) and The Rust Belt MRI (Pudding House). http://arihn.wordpress.com/.

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Waiting for the Snow Front, Watching out
for Deer

I use my debit card to scrape ice from the insideof my windshield. This dark morning drive to workhas a January feel, left over from last year and the yearsbefore. This sameness makes me feel secure, holds mein one patient place. Even the deer remember to wait

for my headlights before leaping across the gravel road,testing my reflexes. They stage along the S curve washboard,but sometimes one will burst from the Russian olive grove.We are in this together. I like to be right in the middleof dialing in the weather forecast on the radiowhen it’s time to hit the brakes, gear down and avoidexcessive swerving. I was made for this. I know the snow

will either come from the north on the Arctic carpet ride,or from the west after cresting the Crazies. The radio tells mewhich horizon to scan once the sun wakes up, but todaythe forecast is interrupted with a news bulletin. Kinsey’s post officeis shutting down, stepping off the map even thoughthe entire town had signed a petition to keep it openwith a hundred per cent voter turnout. Sixty people are not enough

for Washington to listen. This startles me in ways that deer in the darkcannot. Kinsey was where my grandmother raised my mother.Sugar beets and alfalfa fields, deer eating from Grandpa's appletree. Artic fronts or Chinook winds, children filledthe school bus with pioneer family names, wrappedin knitted homespun wool. January led to January.Nothing was meant to change.

Sherry O’Keefe, a descendent of Montana pioneers, is the author of Making Good Use of August (Finishing Line Press). Her most current work has appeared or is forthcoming in Switched-on Gutenberg, THEMA, Terrain. Org., PANK, Avatar Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Two Review, Babel Fruit, The High Desert Journal, and Main Street Rag. Currently working on a full collection, Loss of Ignition, she is the poetry editor for Soundzine. http://www.toomuchaugustnotenoughsnow.blogspot.com.

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blacksmith

in memory of Auld Andra Fraser of Carnwath

he bit on his pipesmoked long round vowels through lipsfixed in the thinnest of scribblesand gripped each word in tongs like thoseonce found in the smithieswhere his consonants were fired and burred

in the tales he told he spoke of kye pairksof doors left onsneck’tof men wha’d been gassed in the war

his craft was mainly bicycles by thencannibaled constructions and repairsbut occasionally on a fancy just to entertain ushe would fire up the cold furnaceand spit sparks from the anvil

kye pairks: cattle fieldsonsneck’t: unlockedwha’d: who’de’s powie wad dirl/as e pín’t oot the airn/bruntin the win wi e’s darg: his hammer would ring/as he struck out the iron/scorching the wind with his labour

Andrew McCallum lives in Southern Scotland and writes in both Scots and English. Finding himself unable to write anywhere else, he can only conclude that his artistic calling is exclusively to give voice to his own remarkable microcosm--the few square miles within which his ancestors (coal miners, farm labourers and railwaymen) have for generations ‘drenched the earth with the sweat of their days before returning to invisibility.' His website can be found at http://www.andrewmccallum.weebly.com/.

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Manatee Springs

Out on the dock, local men are fishing mullet:blue bottom dwellers, casual as koi. In another season

we’d see floating gators here, and the heavy,waterbound shapes of sea cow. But today

it’s snap turtles and the patient, red-eyed perchthat witness your confession: At the end of my life, I'm all alone.

And knowing it, I press your hand.Incredulous, you bend to understand

a grandchild’s sudden sympathy: the slipperyscales of despair, flipping indignant from a heavy hook.

Out! out in summer air: the gasping gills, the strident tail,and slowing rage in lidless eyes. Like a match

the mullet dies: first fierce, then blue,then soft as smoke. Hushed by the stillness of what it knows.

A Seattle native, Susan V. Meyers has lived and taught in Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico. She earned an MFA from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of Arizona, and currently teaches writing at Oregon State University. Her work has recently appeared in Calyx, The Minnesota Review, Rosebud, and Dogwood, and has been the recipient of several awards, most recently a Fulbright Fellowship.

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Mike

Only you and I would be giddily in overalls digging out poles with petrified worms (from the last trip) still clinging to the hooks, throw it all into the trunk of your parents’ old Impala and head south without a map, or enough gas, or any bait. The Tom Sawyer in you always choosing the long way out of town, across the tracks where life tasted rougher, dustier, different. Not just danger and risk—though that was part of it. Some basic truth; life ain’t gonna be no crystal stair.Not for a young gay boy. But I didn’t know (1972—you didn’t know, either). We just knew people thought we were cousins; twins. For an entire year, we snorted like Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine. (Pity the poorteachers who had us together in class.) Summer days, we’d drive your parents’ car all over hell and gone. No particular route or destination. Sometimes the Sangamon, sometimes Kickapoo. Once, the pond in back of your uncle’s farm in Mattoon. Sometimes we never even made it to water, like the time we bought cheese and bread and cider at an Amish farmhouse near Sullivan and chewed the afternoon away in tall grass. The fishing was just an excuse to get in the car and travel where we felt like, to sit in humid air. To be quiet—but mostly to talk and laugh, to get the feeling you get after doing that for hours. Going home had its own ritual, its own expectations of stopping by Steak ‘n’ Shake to buy white bags filled with food wrapped in the same white paper, grease spots spreading out here and there. Then, food-filled and exhausted going the rest of the way home slumped in self-satisfaction, finally quiet, but still incredibly wise.

Priscilla Atkins' poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, TheSouthern Review, and New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry. Presently a resident of Michigan, she is originally from central Illinois, but has also lived in California, Hawaii, and Indiana.

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Putting UpMarian, August 1918

Everything, it seems, ripens

at once: limas and sweetcorn for succotash, cucumbers for relish,peaches for jam.

For three days we chopand snap, pack and boil. I wishmy hair was cornsilk, I say without

the factory, but I’d still ratherplay ball with the boys. Mom sayseverything else must wait

with such abundanceon the vine. When Pop comes homefrom the factory he says don’t

it look like we’ve caughtsummer in those Mason jars.I feel like a tomato, about

to burst.

Ann Eichler Kolakowski is currently a student in the MA program in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, where she also works. Her previous credits include Antietam Review, Concho River Review, The Madison Review, and Slipstream. "Putting Up" is from her manuscript-in-progress, chronicling the lost mill town of Warren, once located in northern Baltimore County, Maryland. Ann's grandmother, Marian Brown, who died in 2006 at the age of 103, spent most of her life in Warren, and is believed to have been the last surviving mill worker.

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Tulsa

Sex is in the eyes and the smell and the past. The hintof sweat from straw-colored hair. The tasteof a smile. The lilting voice. The slow catch of silkon nipples. No man covets shoes, though somecovet memory. Delilah, I miss you. I missTulsa dying in the rearview, the sickly lingerof your cigarettes. But I’m not humping the passenger seatanymore. Remember the time we got stuck in a ditch chasinga field fire? A farmer called a sheriff, refused to tow us,and kept his snake-rifle on us while we scrambledto find wood to shove under the tires. He was afraidwe’d steal the night, the fire, the slow death of not knowingwhat to believe that choked his heart. But we wereall first sons, whistle-britches, all looking for a placeto stick our hearts for safe-keeping. The boarded-over windowsof our mothers’ eyes watched from graves half dugbut not full yet. We were forever looking back, saying:we will stand tall when the winds die down.

The Rye

Where is that white camper of my youth? The oldFord that only drove in third? Horses paintedon the side as we circled the back roadsout by Summer Sweet then back home, stoned boyshanging from the back bumper. When did I beginto consider Holden Caulfield’s student loan debt?The rank smell of feet in his unchanged socks?We drank Cisco, vodka, whatever our already grayinghair could get us across the tracks. We didn’t haveto worry if the music we made was too good, onlyif it was real. Now, there is so little room left in the closetto store my old drum set. Holden didn’t know the cliff’s edgewas protected by a guardrail. We never grew and yetwe’re grown. These knees, blown from humble living—if I could climb, I’d be over that edge, falling, falling.

C.L. Bledsoe is the author of two poetry collections, _____(Want/Need) and Anthem, and a short story collection, Naming the Animals. His poetry chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available online at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. His minichap, Texas, was recently published by Mud Luscious Press. C.L.'s story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. Nominated thrice for the Pushcart Prize, he blogs at Murder Your Darlings (http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com/). C.L. has written reviews for The Hollins Critic, The Arkansas Review, American Book Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and elsewhere.

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Being the Only Child in the Suburbs to Grow Up Eating Homemade Macaroni and Cheese,June Cleaver Goes Back to the Old Neighborhood In Search of a Recipe, Discovers the Kitchen Is Not As Big As She Remembered

There were things you did not havegrowing up,things you wanted–the blue box of macaroni and cheeseturquoise toilet waterlighter blue eyes.

Then there are the gems you hold

in your fists while you sleep–the melody of tap water in a cobalt gobletkey of B as you slip the pad of your finger round the rim,the rush of warm oven heata blanket of soft white cheese,eyes that match your father’sand the river he swam in as a child.

Jill Crammond Wickham is a poet/artist/mother living in Delmar, New York, and funding her writing habit by teaching children's art and writing classes. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Naugutuck River Review, Weave, Blueline, and others.

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My Mother Is Depressed Because She Wanted To Be Totally Transformed In A Year

When my mother cries she hunches,she doesn’t let go, she holds on tighter.My mother the snail, my mother the child,my mother the house on stilts.I have a horror of her monshow pale it is and how it swells,how the hair covers it too thinlyyet over too wide an area.I do not want that, I have thought.Raise your hand if you feel shame when you look in the mirror.Keep it raised if you feel the same shame when you look at your mother.Only the girls?

My mother, pale and puffy, lying on an inch-thick crappy mattressin Sicily somewhere when it’s too hot to move,when all of us are in the room sweating and waiting for something to change.She has stripped in the heat and she is crumpling tomorrow’s maps,squeal-laughing with the absurdity of being overheatedand covered in charts.A family turns like a screw in wood,biting deeper into the grain.We couldn’t stop if we wanted to.

Sarah Stickney recently earned her MFA from the University of New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Scarab, Praxilla, and Clementine magazines. She currently resides in Bologna, Italy, where she has a Fulbright grant to study migrant writing.

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Andy has a button that says, "This is whata feminist looks like"

And when he wears it I remember my mother, the way she took me to the pool whenI was two, when my father left for work and we had the summers together. The onlylanguage I knew was hers. There may not even have been words, it was mother-tongue.But she told me it was time for me to learn how to do things for myself, and put me in thewater with floaties. It was our secret, she said, fathers are too protective. She wanted meantigravity. Her hand under my belly, I floated. No. I was a wave on a body of water: Iskimmed. She told me about swimming lessons at the pier at the Y, the earaches, aboutknowing how to get away in any situation. The body as a vehicle. She lifted and heldme, then slid her hand away, the balancing act between mother and body. The days werelong then, morning stretching and heating like dough or like a baby's lungs when shegasps before pinching her nose, ducking under.

My Father, the Detective, Understands Nothing About Poetry

Dad doesn't get verse, metaphor. He is a concrete thinker.On walks home from preschool,kindergarten, anywhere—he planted silver dollars, pendants,letters between people I'll never meet.He taught me to explore even things we thinkwe know so well. Lessonson clues, on the courage to seek.

There must be a metaphor in there somewhere.When I woke late, we loaded into his unmarked car
with phantom plates, or a van with a periscope,a toilet, recorder gear, stacks of cigarettesand snacks to last the weekand hurried the back roads to beat the late-bell.

It feels unpoemable, that strangeness that feels nothinglike a secret, nothing like an uncovering.There is a bevy of red leather-bound booksin my parents' basement, gold stamped years on the spines.Thirty years seeking out the cityuntil streets become asphyxiation burns—the scorched paths some follow, are followed by.Phone calls with a strained voiceto hear us speak, discover us still alivein pajamas late at night while he guzzled coffeeand considered the notes he'd take later:the body of a six year old, the messy drillstill hanging from his pupil, the fatherstoned dead in front of the smashed television.

My father dizzied and worry-wrinkled—this detail would not make it into archives.

Dad knew the location of every car accidentin Massachusetts, how the bodies hung, eyes explodedonto the streets. He points them out as we driveto buy dog food, take a walk for coffee and donuts.He explains how to push eyeballs back into a face,how to unroll a tongue.These are not my lessons, aren't things I can learnin a lecture. I did not scurry alleywaysfinding fingers dimpled into walls, mortared.

But he kept a journal and never hid it—my father who doesn't understand languageor the craft of it. Every day for thirty years,an entry, striated with photos:"murder, knife, questionable." "wife suspect?""Stench of vomit and burnt rubber. Source of death unknown."

My dad wants his story documented,wants it written out of him.My father the detective. His pocketsof nervous habits and the lessonshe planted in me, an effort to teachthe evil out of this world. His memoirsscribbled like a collection of suicide notesanthologized on a basement workbench.

Carolyne Whelan received her MFA in poetry and nonfiction at Chatham University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Now, Eclectica, and Chapter & Verse, among others, as well as in a collaborative chapbook, Are You Free? (Glass Key Press, 2009). Carolyne's poetry recently won an award from the Sacramento Poetry Center. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the editor of the fledgling chapbook publisher, Longshore Press, while also working as a freelance writer and performer. Her forthcoming chapbook, entitled The Glossary of Tania Aebi, will be published by Finishing Line Press in 2011.

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Treading Waterin the Archipelagoof Bodegas and Brownstones

I’m still photographing chalk outlines on the sidewalk and street in front of a brownstone,the site cordoned off by yellow tape when Where’s the gun? someone in a suit and flashing his badge askssomeone in uniform. Where’s the knife? someone else I can’t see for all the people milling aboutadds. Technicians mutter— maybe to themselves, maybe to each other: fingerprints, DNA.A needle and ballpoint for the homemade tattoos—that’s all they turn up, and those stashed in an underwear drawer.

The TV’s still on inside: Saturday morning cartoons. You can hear the goings-on, the windows wide open, and whatyou can’t you can fill in on your own. Wyl E. Coyote, that sad sap of the southwest, falls off cliffs,lands impaled through the chest on a tree limb below or gets blown up, body parts flunghelter-skelter across the wasteland. An arm lands on a cactus. A leg flies into a circle of vultures overhead.Seconds later, he lifts himself off the limb or collects himself from the sand— a lie not even children buy.

Jim Elledge’s H, a collection of prose poems about outsider artist Henry Darger, is due shortly from Busman’s Holiday Press. His A History of My Tattoo: A Poem, won the 2006 Lambda Literary Award for gay male poetry. Jim's work has appeared in Paris Review, Jubilat, Five Fingers Review, Denver Quarterly, North American Review, and other journals. He directs the MA in Professional Writing Program at Kennesaw State University. His father worked in the blast furnace of Granite City Steel in Illinois for all of his life.

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A Lesson in Talking to My Father

From this window: a neighbor’s kitchen.Girl does algebra, man flips throughan old newspaper, licks his thumb at each page.

His wife flips a burger. So this is family.A house indented from the pageof the street. Its insulation, marrow jammed

behind walls, stands strong as bones,breast milk runs through their pipeslike water. And what of the wish to saw

the legs off their table, crack their whitechina with my teeth. Ashes confettiinto the gutter as I tap my cigarette out

on the roof. The wish to burn a peephole into it, so I can peer upon my fatherbelow, slumped in the recliner, eyes dead

at the weather channel. Could he caremore for the snow in Wisconsin than for me?He is the tumor of this house, waiting to retire,

waiting to be grated out like moldfrom a ceiling. Do I nag like my mother?Let him teach me to flip people off

on the Belt Parkway and file for my taxes?There ought to be a remedial course to teachme how to talk to my father. The old fashioned

way. The Bay 49th way. Anyway that would make the house stopsqueezing me until my ribs hurt: each room

a vast width, throbbing like a muscle pulled.I stand in a stretched coliseum, distance pilesup like bills and I can’t pay a damn thing off.

My father rocking his chair against my head.

Maria DiLorenzo was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA in English from the College of Staten Island, and is currently pursuing a MFA in poetry at Hunter College. Maria was awarded the Provost’s Graduate Study Award in 2009. She was also nominated to read for the CUNY Turn Style reading series in 2010. Her works have appeared in Barrier Islands Review, Caesura, Connotations Press, and Pennsylvania Literary Journal. She currently lives in Staten Island.

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Over-Easy at the All-Night Diner

I dump out the old brew and sizzle up the grill around dawn, when the third shifters thin out and the day shift rolls in, then I spot him; red stitching above his breast pocket reads, Tom.

In wrinkled coveralls, he leans on the counter and orders eggsover hard; yolk hard as the August sun (bubbled like fresh tarunder his roller); leaves me his change and downs the dregs.

Most folks take theirs over-easy, they like for the yolk to ooze,and sop it up with a slice of bread. Most still dreaming, eyes half-open; maybe wishing the day was already over, but nobody says.

Bet he knocks off same time as me; I follow him home, in my head:a tidy one-bedroom painted light blue, with pictures on the walls.We'd sleep in 'til whenever, and then I'd bring his eggs to the bed -

over-easy this time, spread jelly on his toast. Then he turns me once,easy, over. I notice the color of his eyes. (This is where it gets blurry -we have nothing to say, or say nothing; either way, things get tense.)

I'll keep an eye out for a guy with a sewn-on name, to spoil my theorywhile I sizzle up the grill, scoop out fine-ground joe, in no big hurry.

Barbara Sabol’s poetry and prose have appeared in Public-Republic, Blood Lotus, Poets 350, the Tupelo PressPoetry Project, Red Lion Square, Apparatus Magazine, Tributaries, and on the Akron Art Museum's website. Her chapbook, Original Ruse, is forthcoming from Accents Publishing. Barbara has an MFA from Spalding University. She is a speech therapist, living in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio with her partner and dogs.

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A Message for Stephanie

Stephanie, whoever you are,your brother called about 9:15 pmfrom the bar. You know which bar,it’s the one he flees to whenhe just can’t take this shit anymore.

He was already pretty damn toasted,misdialed the number by one clumsy digit,left the message on my phone instead of yours.Didn’t notice the answering machineannounced a strange name.

Stephanieeeee, call me.It’s your brother. Clunk.

Whatever else you do this evening,when he calls again—and we both know he will—call him back.

Or I will, hoping that my brotherwill pick up from the last bar in the universewhere he’s just placed the same calland he’s pretty damn sure that this one timehis despair will be more importantthan my disapproval.

Dr. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish is a poet and literary scholar. Her second poetry collection, Work Is Love Made Visible (West End Press, 2009), won the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award, the Western Heritage Award, and the WILLA Award. She has published poetry in LABOR: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas, Poetry Bay, and Sugar Mule. Dr. Mish is currently a member of the faculty of the Red Earth MFA program at Oklahoma City University.

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Charley Plays a Tune

Crippled in Chicagowith arthritisand Alzheimer's,Charley playsmelancholic melodieson a dust-filledharmonica he found abandonedon a playground of sand.He hears bedlam when he buys fish at the local marketand their skeleton bones show through;lies on his backin a dark rented room,pine cones in his pillows and mattress;prays to Jesus and rubs his rosary beads.Charley blows into his celestial instrument;notes float through the open window,touch the nose of summer clouds.Overtaken with grief,ecstatically alone.Charley plays a solo tune.

Nikki is a little blackkitten, suckles me for milk,and I, her substitute mother,

afloat in a flower bed of love,give back affectionfreely, unlike a money exchange.I go to the kitchen, getFancy Feast, gourmet salmon, shrimp.A new work day begins.

Michael Lee Johnson is a poet and freelance writer from Itasca, Illinois. He says that he is heavily influenced by Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Allen Ginsberg. Michael's new poetry chapbook with pictures is entitled, From Which Place the Morning Rises, and he also has his new photo version of The Lost American: from Exile to Freedom. Published in over 23 countries, Michael is also editor/publisher of four poetry sites, which can be found at http://poetryman.mysite.com.

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Patchwork of Paterson

nobody mugs

except oldtime comics at Saturday matinees.the Passaic River dragging garbagehosts dragon flies with tiffany wings.hearing they nip we never touch, never never.

in the park, we wave forty fingersup at the food counter man—lunging octopuses wanting icepops,dixiecups, creamettes, hambuggies—crunchable junk to chew by cheekloads.

with such scrummunchiesthings aren’t so bad in lonetown,each of us a wheelee-o cowpunkresolved up in his own mind.

i never then named that uncared-for life;i never then took words to own my own.coming around i seethe bunting carouselbuilt of passionate slatsin the middle of kindergarten;Bubbles - age thirteen full ofheart attack in a party tissue-dressflared out on a pebble sidewalk ofrusted, beetle green and blue stones.oh i thought she’d merely gone someplacewith her mother, not gone the waydeath came and went for mostof my faint heart that day.

i see a mad dog in the streetshot in the heart or nearby the guncop; i seerows of silk mills called “shops”where my father’s hearing cracked;deafened by modern new looms,so mad and shaken he did not wantto talk about it ever;he kept a box of styptic pencilshis shaving hand shook soand i was afraid every time i touchedhis twentyplus ring of cold keys orfound a coin he dropped froma pocket no one took time to mend.

David Schultz was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He began writing before puberty and has never stopped. Now some five decades later, he has been published in a number of small magazines for poetry and short stories. David says that writing has been and will be what he most loves to do for the rest of his life.

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Candy Store Shopping List

First, the candy cigarettesFor that cool and mature look,Dangling one of those sugared sticks from the corner of your mouthAnd accenting crude cursing with a deep cough,Like the neighbor down the blockWho, parents said, had been to college,Yet worked in the foundry like everybody else;

And then the M & M’s for pills,Like the ones mom took after she spilled sauce on the kitchen floorAnd screamed at you in the next roomBecause your laughter at the Road Runner had distracted her;

And lastly, a dime CokeShaped like a little woman’s body,Cold and labeled it contained no narcoticsTo swill like your uncle did his beerWhenever he got caught reneging at pinochle;

And then sitting with your friendsUnder the large maple tree in Polonia Park,Watching the bats working the river for insectsAfter the Little League game in which the only home runYou’ll ever hit was wiped out because you failed to touch first base,Needing things like these to fall back on.

Speech for My Sixtieth Birthday

For the first time in my lifeThe cake is mine,This one with my nerdy sixth-grade pictureReproduced in icing.

And what can I sayTo all of my friends and family gathered here tonight?Now I am officially old.Little more should be expected of me:The children are grown;The final accursed essays are graded and shredded as they deserve.

O, there may be a lawn or two to mow;Flowers to be divided and given away.And if I keep my wits about me,A snide comment about those who play golf,As if for the benefit of the souls in Purgatory,Because now I am old and can say what’s on my mind.

At this stage, there is little left to ask for.Yes, I’d like to see the wall in Jerusalem to wail at,Though I don’t believe in wailing.And I want to go to Africa to see lions chasing zebrasTo remind me that nothing naturally reaches this age.

And, though there is no one to thank,There is still much for which to be grateful:

That my daughter, even in her Howard Hospital bed,After she tells me that I might outlive her,Lights up as her lover enters the room;

That my son who waited and waitedFinally gave up on Godot and met love,How across our table at the BoulderadoHe smiled at her so wondrously that heShowed the teeth that made his orthodontist rich;

That same smile that I findIn our photos from Santorini or The Bridge of Angels in RomeWhich kind tourists were gracious enough to take,That same smile that is on my wife’s lovely face tonight.

And finally, to all my family and friends,I would like to raise a glass and sayMay those I love always love.And even those I don’t.Which is how a man thinksWhen he’s certifiably oldAnd about to take a bite out of his head.

Ron Yazinski is a retired English teacher who lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife, Jeanne. His poems have, or will soon appear in Mulberry Poets and Writers Association, Strong Verse, The Bijou Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunarosity, Penwood, Jones Av., Chantarelle’s Notebook, Centrifugal Eye, amphibi.us, Nefarious Ballerina, Amarillo Bay, The Write Room, Pulsar, Menagerie, H.O.D., Forge, and Crash. Ron's chapbook, Houses: An American Zodiac, was published by The Poetry Library. He has also written a full-length book of poems, entitled South of Scranton.

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Line of Sight

Frayed fur, mottled and patchy, the coyotecocked his head and answered his mate.

I stood downwind, but he must have heard the crickets,haphazard in their skitters, startled from my path.

He could hunt beaver, jackrabbits, prairie dogs, or voles,though what could be easier than picking off our chickens.

He leaned his forelegs into the howlas plaintive cries pealed from his chest.

My wife feeds our kids with those eggs.I drew a bead on his head. The other coyote bayed.

I opened steel into sky, opened silencewhere splendor once swayed.

Jill McCabe Johnson is the recipient of the Paula Jones Gardiner Poetry Award from Floating Bridge Press, and two Pushcart nominations. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University, and is pursuing a PhD in English at the University of Nebraska. Her writing has been published in numerous journals, including The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Quarterly, and Harpur Palate.

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Salmonberry Mountain, 1911

Working with double-bitted axessharp enough to get a good shave,fallers hew out slotsto fit springboards into bark.

Balancing on these planks, chips flylike ants gnawing a giant stalk.

After the wedged out cut, big enoughfor a lumberjack to lay downand pretend he might be crushed,they rip with a crosscut sawthe entire afternoon,until the tree begins to snap.

Leaping like bucks,each man searches for safety—playing the oddsthe fir will not fall crazy,pounding them with one blowas a sledge drives a stake.

Where the crown used to beis a hole in the canopylike looking upfrom the bottom of a grave.

Mark Thalman's book, Catching the Limit (2009), is part of Fairweather Books' Northwest Poetry Series. His poetry has been widely published over the last three decades, and has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, CutBank, Many Mountains Moving, Pedestal Magazine, and Verse Daily, among others. Mark received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and teaches English in the public schools. He is editor of http://www.poetry.us.com/, an anthology publishing national and regional poets. Mark lives in Forest Grove, Oregon. http://www.markthalman.com.

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Boilermakers

The can SNAPS and exhales as hetears off the top and slips it inside,knocks back a double VO thena long cool swig of Genny,

the shot glass slams downa starter gun for the melodic belch,echo inside the chemical vatshe scrubbed at the varnish company.

Hit me again! And, after the secondtilts his head back, Ahhhhhh…those were not the glass lined tanksof Old Latrobe, no one drank Rolling Rock

after pulling him out the pittedsteel tanks he lowered himself intoevery night the second half ofthird shift to scrub the caustic

with caustic that over years thinnedand pulled the skin across and aroundhis face and balding skull so tighthe became his nickname, Tuna,

drinking with the other fishat the gin mill across the streeteach dawn before swimming hometighter and smaller each day

with black lunch pails to be foundone day packed with a few documents,shriveled policies, worthless stock,waving on their way out of the plant

to the boiler men walking into stoke fire and steam, crankthe monstrous valves of another day,shout to the line teratoids

R.A. Pavoldi's poems have been published in FIELD, Hanging Loose, Margie, Exquisite Corpse, and ARS MEDICA: A Journal of Medicine, Health and the Humanities, Mount Sinai Hospital, Department of Psychiatry. He received an International Merit Award in Atlanta Review’s 2005 International Poetry Competition and in 2003, was a finalist in The St. Louis Poetry Center’s 43rd Annual National Poetry Contest, judged by James Tate. He makes his living in the publications development, production and distribution at Excelsior College in Albany, New York.

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Eulogy for a Modern Day Proletarian“And for every death / there was a building or a poem." - Stephen Dunn, Introduction to the 20th Century

Comrade, your work is through at last.But lest you think you came up shortwhile drawing straws in the afterlife as wellas this one, let me say this: be not rememberedfor your smoke stacks or fire escapes,but the gentle rise of your arm as you displayedyour wares, the grace with which you cappedbottle after endless bottle. No rebar stuffedbeneath your arms like crutches, no air conditioner’swheeze, only the memory of your assembly line antics,a spoon dangling from your nose while the restclanked to the factory floor.

Recall that a building looks out and sees onlyother buildings reflected in its glass face. A poemlooks inward, to the pocket change you always keptfor the violinist at top of the subway stairs.A poem hangs a cross around your neckinstead of a badge. You lose a dimension,and yet we clearly see your face pressedagainst the thin pane of the page, beard trimmedand black, eyes erased at last of pain.

A week before your last, you told meI feel the weight of the world on my shoulders.Comrade, light as a post-it, stiff as a screwdriver,we recall you now in a comfy chair with a cupof chamomile. No more shift work whistle,no more time card punch, no droning whirfrom the hydraulic wrench, just the whisper,imagine, of a slowly turned page.

Jennifer Gresham's work has appeared in numerous literary jounrals, such as Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Rattle, among others. Her book, Diary of a Cell, was the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, judged by Charles Harper Webb. Jennifer is currently the author of the blog, Everyday Bright.

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The Man Who Taught Me Endurance

I knew a postal clerk with one small job - to untie knotson misdirected parcels, a wizened gnome hunchedover a low wooden table scarred with scissor wounds,ink tattoos and stacked high with every rope conceivable:hemp coils, nylon, polyester, and polypropylene

all braided, kneaded, twisted, cross-hatched, choked, and tangledin prophetic yet productive shapes such as dolly knotsthat held their loads as long as something tugged the other way.The man untied all kinds - double eights for climbers, half-hitchesfor those who couldn't bear heavy loads, true lovers (overhand knots

that must be equal to stay locked), and the hangman,a final knot applied when others would not hold.Everyday from six a.m. till four p.m. for forty yearshe battled boredom, visualizing himself as Marie Antoinettein her last few moments while she inhaled the steel and terrorsparking from a sharpening wheel in the courtyard of her palace.

The Immigrants - 1929

Grandpa healed the great locomotives, herding themout of Southern Railway shops along the veins of tracksconnecting both coasts to the Hoosier heartland. Paid enoughfor bread and a few of those potatoes the Irish learned to love,he brought home a bag of coal every week in winterto fire the iron stove rising from the floor like a black orchid.That stove split the house into kitchen and parlor.Grandma bought “blue john” milk from a horse drawn wagonand enough sugar to make the oatmeal taste better than paste,but all that luxury ended when the stock market crashed.The Southern trains quit running. Not afraid of hard laborGrandpa took odd jobs at first, then hired on with the WPAto clear brush, swing a pick, bust rock into gravel and builda hundred farm roads that still crisscross Gibson county.The word Depression had more to do with cash than self-esteem.If he plowed no garden no garden got plowed, fed no chickensno chickens were fed, and dinner wasn’t as long on presentationas it was practicality in those lean days, those days they learnedthat living with need was better than giving in or up.Grandma shared no patience with wastrels in her house.My dad and uncle “Ding” split wood or went to bed hungry,although a hobo might sample apple pie if the budgethad allowed for a show of wealth on a particular week.These rules sustained their home –Treat others better than you would treat yourself.If you must steal bread to keep from going hungry, go hungry.Curse only when the Cardinals lose the pennant.Never take a drink on Sunday and use spittoons in the house.Say nothing at the dinner table that doesn’t sound grateful.Show all women respect and all men equality.When you die, let no one wish it had happened sooner –and because they followed them, they never felt poor.

Jim McGarrah’s poems and essays have appeared most recently in After Shocks: Poems of Recovery, Avatar Review, Bayou Magazine, The Café Review, Connecticut Review, The DuPage Valley Review, Elixir Magazine, and North American Review. He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down and When the Stars Go Dark. McGarrah has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and was a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest.

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Fruits of Labor [spoken word]

"Fruits of Labor" is about William S. Webster's father who was a commercial and residential painter, and with whom he worked for many years. William is an Associate Professor of English at South Georgia College, where he teaches a largely rural community.

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Rap Poem for Generation Gaps [spoken word]

Michelle Tokarczyk's book of poetry, The House I'm Running From, was published by West End Press. Her work has also appeared in several journals and anthologies, including the minnesota review, Calling Home: An Anthology of Working-Class Women's Writing, and For a Living: The Poetry of Work. In addition to being a poet, she is a professor of English at Goucher College and a scholar of working-class studies.